Dover boys hockey suffers first loss

DOVER — The Dover High School boys hockey team was missing its scoring touch on Saturday. The way coach Steve Riker saw it, the Green Wave were missing a lot of other things too.

“A little gumption, a little energy, a little emotion,” Riker said. “I’m very concerned with the way we approached today’s game and the way we went about playing it. We really didn’t do a lot of things right.”

Goffstown was a 4-0 winner over the Green Wave at the Dover Arena, handing Dover its first Division II loss of the season. Goffstown has won six straight.

“We’ve had a pretty solid streak so far, and it’s weird to lose,” Dover senior forward Sean Lombard said. “We have to take it in step and come together more and realize our mistakes from this game.”

Dover (6-1-1) went into Saturday’s contest averaging just under five goals a game and was coming off a 10-4 thrashing of Winnacunnet just three nights earlier. But the Green Wave struggled all night finding the net and were outshot 33-30.

“We didn’t work hard where we needed to,” Riker said. “What we did really well was we turned the puck over really well. We didn’t back check very well. We hung our goalie out to dry very well. Those are the things we did very well today, and none of them were really good.”

After a scoreless first period, Goffstown (6-2) struck twice in the second and Dover could not recover. Dakota Mulcay scored for Goffstown just 20 seconds into the period.

A key sequence came late in the middle frame when Dover’s Sam Bovee was called for roughing in the crease, negating a Green Wave power play. When the Grizzlies went on the mad advantage, Andrew Chretien skated right in and fired the puck over the left shoulder of Dover goalie Luc Ravenelle for a 2-0 advantage.

“Am I surprised (by the shutout)? Yes,” Goffstown coach Paul Roy said. “Am I surprised by our effort? No. We’ve had good effort. We started off a little slow out of the gate, but we were getting a little bit from a lot of kids.”

Dover played much more aggressively in the third period, but continued to come up empty. The extra intensity backfired when Goffstown’s Tyler Grinley stole the puck at the Grizzlies’ blue line and skated into open ice for a breakaway. He got the puck past Ravenelle for a 3-0 advantage at 11:31, ending any hope for a late Dover comeback. An empty-net goal gave Goffstown a 4-0 lead.

Dover now faces a difficult stretch with three of its next five games against teams expected to be playoff contenders in D-II. It begins Wednesday at Merrimack, which was 7-0 entering this weekend.

“I’m sure they want to beat us,” Riker said about Merrimack, whom the Green Wave defeated in the championship game two years ago. “It will be a matter of if we want to beat them. Because tonight, it looked like Goffstown really wanted to beat us. I think tonight we almost looked like we could care less whether we won or lost this game.”